1/Stuart Allan (UK): Citizen Video Witnessing of Human Rights: The Case
of WITNESS
Stuart Allan is Professor and Head of the School of Journalism, Media
and Cultural Studies (JOMEC) at Cardiff University, UK. Stuart has
published widely in journalism, media and cultural studies. He has
authored seven books, the most recent of which is Citizen Witnessing:
Revisioning Journalism in Times of Crisis (Polity Press, 2013), and
edited eleven others, including The Routledge Companion to News and
Journalism (Routledge, 2012; revised edition) and Photojournalism and
Citizen Journalism: Co-operation, Collaboration and Connectivity
(Routledge, 2017). His research has also appeared in numerous
peer-reviewed journal articles and contributions to edited collections,
and has been translated into several languages. He serves on the
editorial boards of fifteen international journals, including
Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism; Digital Journalism; New
Media & Society; Media, War & Conflict; Communication, Culture &
Critique; Text & Talk; Environmental Communication; Time & Society;
Journalism & Communication Monographs; and Global Media and China.

2/James Bridle (UK): The Electromagnetic Border Zone

James Bridle is a British writer, artist, publisher and technologist
currently based in Athens, Greece. His work covers the intersection of
literature, culture and the network. As a journalist and essayist he has
written for the Guardian, the White Review, Frieze, WIRED, ICON, Domus,
Cabinet, the Atlantic, the New Stateman and many other publications, and
between 2011 and 2015 wrote a regular column for the Observer newspaper
on publishing and technology.

3/Nico Carpentier (BE): The dark sides of online participation

Nico Carpentier is Professor in Media and Communication Studies at the
Department of Informatics and Media of Uppsala University. In addition,
he holds two part-time positions, those of Associate Professor at the
Communication Studies Department of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB
– Free University of Brussels) and Docent at Charles University in
Prague. Moreover, he is a Research Fellow at the Cyprus University of
Technology and Loughborough University. His latest book is The
Discursive-Material Knot: Cyprus in Conflict and Community Media
Participation (2017, Peter Lang, New York). He is also the curator of
Respublika! A Cypriot Community Media Arts festival 2017 – 2018.

4/Cynthia Carter (UK): Citizen Journalism and Children: Investigating
Rights of Access, Opportunity and Voice
Cynthia Carter UK is a Reader in the School of Journalism, Media and
Cultural Studies, Cardiff University, with research interests and
expertise in news, journalism and gender; children, news and
citizenship; and media violence. Her recent books include the Routledge
Companion to Media and Gender (2014) and Current Perspectives in
Feminist Media Studies (2013) and is currently working on a co-edited
book for Routledge, Journalism, Gender and Power (with Linda Steiner and
Stuart Allan). She is founding Co-Editor of Feminist Media Studies
(Routledge) and serves on the editorial boards of numerous academic
journals.

5/Joke Hermes (NL): On reconnecting with disengaged sceptics

Joke Hermes is a professor of applied research in Media, Culture and
Citizenship at Inholland University, she teaches television studies at
the University of Amsterdam. She has published widely on gender, media,
popular culture, research methodology and the creative industries.
Recent work includes a study of independent workers in the creative
industries; the hatred of Breaking Bad’s Skyler White in online audience
discussion and white reluctance to give up on racist stereotype in the
Dutch Black Pete controversy. She is currently developing participant
design methods both for creative industries research more generally and
intercultural media literacy research specifically, as well as a new
book on watching ‘post’ television. She is founder and co-editor of the
European journal of Cultural Studies.

6/Nicos Trimikliniotis (CY): Peace journalism, partitions and potential
for overcoming austerity-and-chauvinist citizenship in divided Cyprus:
Drawing on Cyprus and South Africa
Nicos Trimikliniotis is Professor of Sociology and Social Sciences, at
the School of Social Sciences, University of Nicosia. He heads the team
of expert of Cyprus team for the Fundamental Rights Agency of the EU. He
is also a practicing Barrister. He has researched on integration,
citizenship, education, migration, racism, free movement of workers, EU
law, discrimination and Labour Law. He is the National Expert for Cyprus
for the European Labour Law Network. He is part of the international
team on world deviance, which produced Gauging and Engaging Deviance
1600-2000, Tulika press (2014) and its’ sequel Scripts of Defiance
(2017). Selection of Publications: Mobile Commons, Migrant Digitalities
and the Right to the City, Pivot, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; Beyond a
Divided Cyprus: A State and Society in Transformation, Palgrave
MacMillan, 2012; The Nation-State Dialectic and the State of Exception,
Savalas, Athens, 2010; Rethinking the Free Movement of Workers: The
European Challenges Ahead, Wolf Legal Publishers, Nijmegen, 2009.

+++++

"Selecting in the new planetary humanity those characteristics that
allow for its survival, removing the thin diaphragm that separates bad
mediated advertising from the perfect exteriority that communicates only
itself – this is the political task of our generation." (Giorgio
Agamben, The Coming Community, University of Minnesota Press, 1993, p63)

Agamben’s statement implies a sense of urgency, a call to humanity to
form a completely new engagement with politics, a shared uniting form of
representation, the perfect exteriority. This may be seen as an
unachievable ideal, even for informed citizens, especially in context to
the current condition of uncertain notions of citizenship, disuniting
nationalisms, refugees and internal displacement caused by incessant
wars, migration caused by climate change and bots generating fake news.
Corporate and government media’s insistence on defending a collapsing
political, economic and social system has created reverberations of
disillusionment and mistrust leading to a decline in conventional forms
of political involvement. Nonetheless, we are witnessing an alternative
form of participatory democracy and a higher level of engagement on the
web by citizen bloggers, described by Michael Schudson as “monitorial
citizens.” (Michael Schudson, Good Citizens and Bad History: Today’s
Political Ideals in Historical Perspective, Communication Review 1, no.
4, 2000) This ubiquitous presence of citizen journalism is in itself not
without issues. Stuart Allan addresses these concerns and conceptualises
social media outreach from ordinary citizens as “citizen witnessing.”
(Stuart Allan, Citizen Witnessing: Revisioning Journalism in Times of
Crisis, Polity Press, 2013) It is from both these scholars we take the
title for this conference.

The growing demand for political and corporate clarity is a manifold
topic of discussion on social media. The speed with which
data-processing is conducted provides the citizen blogger with almost
instant access to information but it also ensures that crucial issues
may become evanescent. The acuity with which we address these issues
requires serious attention in order to secure increased citizen
participation, to expand and reinforce the demand for greater individual
security, privacy and transparency of governance. Accomplishing these
would provide tangible credibility for technology’s claim of
democratising the world.

State Machines: Art, Work and Identity in an Age of Planetary-Scale
Computation
Focusing on how such technologies impact identity and citizenship,
digital labour and finance, the project joins five experienced partners
Aksioma (SI), Drugo More (HR), Furtherfield (UK), Institute of Network
Cultures (NL) and NeMe (CY) together with a range of artists, curators,
theorists and audiences. State Machines insists on the need for new
forms of expression and new artistic practices to address the most
urgent questions of our time, and seeks to educate and empower the
digital subjects of today to become active, engaged, and effective
digital citizens of tomorrow.

Funding

Co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union and the
Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture

This project has been funded with the support from the European
Commission. This communication reflects the views only of the author,
and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be
made of the information contained therein.